I will offer another idea in the same spirit: we should have a national ID system along with comprehensive administrative data about where everyone lives. This would simplify many different government and business processes, make the administrative state work better, solve questions like voter ID, and would not meaningfully impact anyone's privacy.
No, it's better to have to bring a ragged copy of your birth certificate, a dog-eared paper social security card, and some utility bills to prove who you are. That's a system that has stood the test of time - why change it?
Ha - I have a utility bill that I subscribe to for the pure reason of needing (X) number utility bill to submit for idiotic things to "prove my identity". It's literally that stupid.
Not only an ID but it should be associated with a bank account (at the fed or treasury) and be cryptographically enabled so you can use it to prove your identity for financial transactions etc and verify properties like your age in a zero trust fashion. These features will essentially ensure everyone has one.
Right now our digital lives are all at risk because we sometimes lose things like phones keyfobs so we need to be able to access our digital accounts if that happens. The right way to fix this is the same system for passports, the government is responsible for verifying your identity and not Gmail. That way you don't need to worry you will lose your email if you secure it and if not it can be used to steal your money. Post office branches should perform these services.
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The government bank accounts need only be mediums of exchange you can go to a private bank for interest, ATMs etc
The identifying information should also be changeable in case of fraud. You can prove your identity some other way, like showing up in person with your face and fingerprints, and get a new ID card with a new number. That way it's also more secure than a social security number.
On my phone I have a Digital ID, passport verified. Easy and at no cost to me. However, I doubt I will ever be asked to use it. I have tried to use my Maryland Digital License at TSA several times, but only get weird looks from the agents and hostile stares ( I assume) from the folks behind me! But maybe sometime, this will be the way to go.
One thing that always makes me enraged at our system is traveling to Europe. I went through a spell at work where I had to fly to Europe several times a year. It was so much easier going through passport control at Heathrow as an American than it was going through passport control when arriving back in the US.
Members of Congress should be paid a lot more. Considering that Congress hasn't given itself a pay raise in nearly 20 years shows that this idea is not popular. Many of my coworkers believe that members of Congress are paid to much as it is. Do we really expect members of Congress to work solely out of their own goodwill and sense of duty?
You can add “increase the number of professional staff members” to your list. It’s not a perfect solution but it seems to me to be a necessary way to reduce the power of lobbyists & the congressional leadership.
It’s amazing to me how hard it is to convince people that increasing salaries for Congressmen, senators and staffers would actually decrease how many rich people work in Congress and how much “millionaires and billionaires” have influence over legislation
Running for office is a full-time job, even for state-level jobs.
A candidate for state house I know is spending 20+ hours a week meeting constituents. He has a job but it's on hold so not paying him. His wife keeps the household running. All this to get a job that runs about half the year and pays $14,000. The dream is to be speaker of the state house, that's a princely sum of $38,000.
I think it's an underrated reason why a lot of State legislatures end up having a disproportionate number of members with extreme view or lets be frank, absolute lunatics.
I suspect a lot of "normal" people are put off by risk/reward aspect of running for office in part due to the money issue.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike what Newt Gingrich has done to America but an underrated one was his changes to the institution of Congress itself and how much he gutted money that goes to staffers.
I don't think this is politically homeless in the same way Matt's ideas are though. It sounds like something Dems would *want* to support but think would just leave them too vulnerable to attack.
Yes, I'd be fine with both but I would choose the staffers first, and it might be more politically palatable too, since staffers don't evoke the "Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns" reaction as much as politicians do.
One worker in Congress for every 20,000 residents does not strike me as a particularly high ratio. To say the least. Most House members have tiny staffs relative to the amount of work they do.
We'd do a lot better to redirect all of the immense manpower that's wasted on our (I am not making this number up) 90,000 mostly pointless busybody local governments into national policymaking.
My even more unpopular opinion is all the rule-making bureaucrats in executive branch agencies should actually work directly for Congress, helping craft legislation. Republicans don't like this because it would require spending money on Congress and for Congress to, you know, occasionally do something. Democrats don't like this because their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends would no longer be free to make laws.
This is sort of interesting because if you're familiar with the right wing arguments downstream of unitary executive theory, right wingers are arguing agencies and their staff are already creatures of Congress rather than the president.
My understanding is most analysis is done on self-reported trades, which are far from comprehensive. Eg Nancy Pelosi reports all her (husband’s) trading activity, but most don’t.
Also high-level appointees at agencies like NIH, whose pay is capped at a fraction of what they would be earning as full professors at an R1 medical school, while having vastly more responsibility. It's insane.
The issue is actually less pay to members per se (though that should be raised somewhat) and more pay to staff, which is awful and not competitive even with the Executive Branch much less the private sector. It's preposterous how skinflint our legislative branch is when it comes to paying for good policymaking.
But, like many of the ideas here, this is just Republicans starving government services and Dems being politically intimidated into not doing the right thing because it's easily demagogued.
Members of Congress get paid a fine amount—$174,000 is already well into the top 10% of salaries. Saying that getting paid that much is just working out of goodwill and duty is kind of insulting to most people. There is dignitary value in knowing that the people who rule us aren’t also making unfathomable amounts of money. They shouldn’t have it all.
You made a weird and bad faith pas de deux going from "they shouldn't be paid less than a first year associate at a Big Law firm" to "so you mean they should be paid unfathomable amounts of money?"
There's a massive amount of monetary space between those two options. Collapsing them is bad.
The big disconnect here is that, for the sort of people who typically become Congresspeople and the sort of people who typically know Congresspeople, $174,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money. For the average voter, it sounds like a ton, because the average voter is paid $62,000 (median earnings).
I suspect if you asked the average voter what CEOs should be paid, you'd get an answer in the range of $500,000-$1,000,000 a year - and they'll probably tell you that no-one should earn more than 50K in their first year of work, regardless of what they do (ie first-year associates should be on 50K or so, and they'll get to 100K in about five years).
The problem here is that voters have the ability to set Congressional pay as if the economy had the pay distribution they would like it to have, but they can't shape the whole economy to have that pay distribution, which rather leaves Congress in the cold.
Also voters wouldn't support the sort of interventions needed to make the private sector set pay the way they think it should. It isn't even a "will the ends but not the means" thing, it's just not something they've really ever thought about properly, but there are a lot of people who think that since they are paying taxes, no-one being paid out of those taxes should earn a lot more than they personally earn. It's not systematic, it's not thought-through, it's just "two hundred grand is way too much money, it's more than three times what I get paid".
I bet 99% of first year associates at big law firms would happily trade places with members of Congress. It’s a crappy job and that’s why they have to get paid a lot. Being a member of Congress is an extremely powerful job and it offends people’s egalitarian sensibilities for it to also be extremely well-paid.
The average House member spends 50% of their time just on raising money for the next election, never mind all the travel involved. I doubt most associates would like that. If they did they would've gone into sales.
That would cost more. Once someone is spending c.100 nights in a single place, it's cheaper to rent or buy full-time than to pay for hotels or short-stay rentals.
What the government should do is buy a property in DC (which the Congressperson chooses, within a government-set budget), let the Congressperson live in it rent-free while they are in Congress, and then sell it when they leave. That's easily the cheapest way to do it, as the increase in value accrues to the government, not to the Congressperson. At the moment, they take on a mortgage on a property in DC, and if they stay in Congress long enough to pay that mortgage off (or even a substantial part of it), they can sell up when they leave and make a significant profit from doing so.
I know people sometimes suggest building an apartment building for Congress, but that would be much more expensive than just letting them pick one on the open market for a fair price and then having the Federal Government buy it - because concentrating all of them in one place would create a security risk that having them spread all over DC doesn't.
Three cheers for three deeply useful perspectives. Now to the even more burning question - why are these (to this reader) genuinely correct views so homeless.
Well, look at the childish level of the gerrymandering debate that's playing out now - you started it! No, you started it! Everyone mouths the words that say gerrymandering isn't good, but yet keeps digging the hole deeper.
Maybe they'll soon get to rock bottom on this issue and start doing something constructive instead of destructive, but it's a very slow process, and there are a lot more issues like this than there is attention span to focus on them all.
I feel fairly confident that if Democrats come out of the current gerrymandering cycle with a slight advantage, they'll lose interest in any reforms that don't lock in their advantage, until population shifts erode it.
As Matt has written about before, Democrats are still fighting against measures they see as suppressing voter turnout despite any such measure now being to their advantage, so I don't think the observed behavior of Democrats supports your prediction.
I don't think they'll trust the advantage to stick and they'd be a lot happier with a national anti-gerrymandering law. They've only been able to get the measures they have done by putting sunset clauses in; they can't rely on winning a referendum every ten years (both CA and VA have been much closer than the general D-R margin).
The first and the third seem like a straight up tradeoff of being costly versus being insufficiently strict, with the twist being that one side each on the simplistic right/left spectrum being on inverted ends of each one.
And the guest worker one seems to be a values issue of whether we want foreign people at all in the country versus fully integrating foreign customs into the country, with economic considerations a bit on the side of that, even if it's positive sum.
The primary system funnels freaks into general election, which then funnels them into office, and working with the opposing side is seen as selling out. Case and point, AIPAC is running attack ads against Tom Malinowski for voting “with Trump and the Republicans to fund ICE”.
The content of attack ads is often unrelated to their motive. AIPAC only cares about candidates' support for Israel, but if they deem someone insufficiently pro-Israel, they will run whatever ads they think will hurt them.
I've heard similar things about the other kind of AI PAC -- they choose politicians to oppose on the basis of who wants to regulate AI, but attack them on what they think voters won't like. I vaguely recall something about the OpenAI-funded PAC attacking a candidate for being too pro-AI when their real motive for attacking the candidate was the opposite, but I don't remember the details or where I saw it (maybe somewhere in Zvi Mowshowitz's substack, but that's a big and messy place to search).
Another politically dead idea is bringing back and investing heavily in institutions or asylums for the mentally ill. Conservatives love to talk about getting the crazies off the street. There is nowhere to put them - we can’t jail them permanently for being homeless, and not in the general population. Liberals love to talk about helping them in a way that preserves their agency and rights. Some of them are too ill for that to work.
We don't have the jail space to do it permanently either and it's preferable not putting schizophrenic in with general pop in any case.
This stuff costs money. I wonder how much cash the average schmuck would be willing to shell out to not have people sleeping in doorways and talking to spirits?
It does cost a lot of money, but probably a net financial benefit, keeping someone on the streets is incredibly expensive in terms of healthcare and police time.
Yeah, the core problem with institutionalization is that unless you're just warehousing people in feces-stained dungeons (which has its own... obvious... issues) it costs a metric ass-tonne of money, and it's questionable to say the least whether the outcomes are worth it.
This is such a values-driven issue that I wish the more expensive options could be opt-in somehow—like through targeted taxes or rich donors. Most people can agree there’s a moral dimension here, but how much you’re willing to spend on uncertain claims about the welfare of severely mentally ill people varies a lot from person to person.
I guess it's already kind of that way, because different states and cities fund things differently, but maybe large states or private institutions could attempt to make it more explicit.
Love all of these. In the spirit of piece, I'll add my own: taxes on vehicle miles traveled (as well as all highways as toll roads) to replace the ineffectual gas tax. Would people hate it? Absolutely, it would never happen! It would probably force people onto surface streets in the short term (which is why you'd need to tax all miles traveled).
But tolling would (a) cause people to drive less, (b) force governments to think harder about which highways to build/expand/retire.
Roads are a really expensive line item for local and state agencies; we also should really be sunsetting roads with less heavily traveled. You can say this is unfair to more rural people and it is but they are eating up a disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of revenue created and are loss leaders.
Honestly, my unpopular opinion in the theme of these is that we should really be using more sub-urban and urban new housing to re-home the disaffected MAGA voters dying deaths of despair.
It's foolish to try to give enough money to each small town and locality to produce more jobs for them but we can definitely get them more housing in more urban areas (eventually). This would lead to greater avg worker productivity and to closer alignment with political democracy on the margins.
I think my most unpopular opinion is "ghost towns are good; better to empty the place out when there's no longer an economic use for it than to have people hanging on with an entire economy running on subsidies from elsewhere"
I dunno. In my area, the people with the longest commutes are lower- middle income people who can’t afford to live in the city. They already suffer from the longer commute and greater gas expenditure, and can’t work from home or easily cut back on their driving in other ways. I wouldn’t want to penalize them further.
That's because it's illegal to build the housing they need in the city. Everyone's commutes could be shorter if we stopped letting NIMBYs run the show.
It would be really easy with modern tech to give poor people a discount on tolls (no one else would even need to know!) just like some cities do for bus passes, but I never hear anyone talk about this.
Controlled access freeways are definitely the easiest to put use fees on, for sure. A total VMT use fee would still be easy to charge by just looking at the odometer, and a weight coefficient on at least the vehicle is easy to calculate, although it can't account for cargo as easily. The congestion coefficient is more difficult, though, becuase I worry that outside freeways that would require transponders, and people would lose their shit over that.
I agree just tolling highways isn’t as optimal, but in the near term it’s more practical.
Odometer VMT opens up state-level squabbles about who gets the revenue—is it fair that CT gets to keep a Fairfield commuter’s VMT revenue when they spend a significant amount of time driving in NY?
In any event, first step would be to repeal the toll ban on federally funded highways.
Don't many cars have built-in GPS already? The data is being generated about where they are, and therefore how far they travel along a given road. You just need to give the information to the department of transportation.
And that's where people would freak out--"I don't want the government tracking where I'm going!!!!", even though it can be designed to just give the government the status of the road as being under one jurisdiction, or whether or not it's congested, and not precisely which road and where on the road the vehicle is.
The gas tax is easy to levy and encourages more fuel efficient vehicles. It’s true that the tax isn’t very high, but the tax isn’t high for a reason which wouldn’t disappear if replaced.
They don't *have* to, but any other funding would be a cross subsidy to heavy use motorist commuters at the expense of light use and non-motorist commuters. A use fee for government services makes the best sense here.
They could make vehicle registration fees more expensive to compensate for gas tax revenue falling. That would effectively be a subsidy from low-mileage to high-mileage users, but would also be a strong incentive to low-mileage users to not have a car at all any more.
Interesting points, except for the claim that leftists shy away from making prisons more humane. Is there evidence for that? Here in NYC, I know that Zohran Mamdani has ended solitary confinement, seems far more committed than Eric Adams to closing Rikers, and is already moving to open new infirmaries and better borough-based jails. From what I see, the opposition is entirely on the conservative side: either resistance to spending more money or pressure from the corrections union, whose officers are unhappy about losing solitary confinement as a tool for dealing with unruly prisoners.
The people who want to close Rikers because it's inhumane (which it genuinely is) typically do not want to build a new facility or facilities of similar scale and just house the same set of people in humane conditions.
My understanding is that the only real reason the city is doing this is because the corrections workers had too hard a time getting in to work and were complaining about it (or, because their absurd union contract allows for unlimited sick leave, simply not showing up). Otherwise it makes little sense - the exact same corrections officers will staff the borough prisons.
That’s fair! My point is that Riker’s closure was something the city wanted to make happen for boring technical (not necessarily technocratic) reasons. But it could never be sold on those terms, because the last thing anyone wants to hear is that a prison is opening up next door. The spirit of the 2010s provided a window to push it through, under the veneer of concern over the inhumanity of conditions at Riker’s. As you note, the people who were fired up about its closure would have strongly preferred that it not be replaced (or they’d compromise with replacing it with something much smaller).
"has ended solitary confinement" that's only more humane if you replace it with something. Otherwise you end up with a situation where prisoners who stab, assault and prey on other prisoners have no deterrent. The weak prisoners have human rights, too!
I would like time in prison to be a little more unpleasant than an airline flight. Somewhere in the range of breaking rocks in the hot sun seems appropriate.
It sounds like you might not know that much about how other rich country prison systems work, or if you do, you might be making apples-to-oranges comparisons based on the mix of prisoners inhabiting various incarceration systems.
Is your claim that US prisons (taking that to mean the whole of the penal incarceration system) get better results than other rich countries, or that they're nicer to be incarcerated in?
There's a bunch of things that are worth thinking about. Starting with rich countries - I assume you're talking about places like the Nordics and other places in Western Europe that appear to have it together, because equally rich and orderly Japan, S Korea and Taiwan have a level of strictness that you'd probably consider inhumane.
But a more important point is that you really have to try to do an apples to apples comparison, and "taking the whole of the penal incarceration system" is kind of a dodge. The states of Mississippi and Louisiana have homicide rates around 30 per 100,000, versus around 1 per 100k in most of Europe and lower single digits for the safer states in the USA.
You just can't expect prisons, nor public expectations, to function the same way in a lockup that's housing large fraction of repeat violent criminals when compared to one that's mostly traffic violations, and a ton of differences you're complaining about are simply downstream of those levels of criminality.
But if you narrow things down to the most apples-to-apples comparisons, comparing say, low-risk level lockups from safer US states to medium or high risk level lockups in Europe, everything from the conditions to the recidivism start to look a lot more similar
(also it's commonly missed that a large portion of low Euro recidivism is due to deporting immigrants, who make up like 25-50% of their incarcerated, after their sentence.)
Here are a couple trackers with relevant data if you're curious:
I'm at least somewhat familiar with the Western European approach to incarceration since that's where I live. I think their approach would be a bad fit for the US due to the relative disparity in social cohesion between countries.
I think higher social cohesion and commensurate lower rates of severe crime enable you to have a kinder, gentler prison system. I suspect people in favor of a kinder, gentler prison system think the causality runs the other way.
I think lower rates of social cohesion and more violence leads Americans to choose worse prison systems but I don't think it makes those systems more necessary. America's high rate of violent crime doesn't necessitate letting the Aryan Nation run federal prisons.
The only serious approaches I've heard for breaking the control of Aryan Nation (who are probably less powerful than their Hispanic counterparts, fwiw) are hardcore "penal" solutions, like solitary and the death penalty for prison murders.
I'm not against left-coded, soft-on-crime approaches to better prisons, but when it comes to the worst-of-worst criminals like these prison gangs, it's really hard to see how any of them are supposed to work.
"It's pointless cruelty." it could be that. But there can also be reform regimes that impose discipline and structure, and meaningful work, even (perhaps especially) very hard work can sometimes provide that, and might be less cruel in the end than the tedious chaos of prison life as it usually exists.
I think there are obvious exploitability problems with the way liberals have recently balanced trans rights and the housing of prisoners, but it's inflammatory and stupid to say that leftists are "AOK with violent men in women's prisons."
Go to InfoWars with this shit (while you still can!). Don't waste our time with it.
I think that if you told a Mamdani voter that they were getting borough-based prisons, but free buses, the 25 student classroom mandate, and expansion of rental vouchers were off the table because of a tight budget, you might be murdered.
I was guessing that Matt's views on housing, education, and the global poor were going to make the list, but he's written a lot about those, and perhaps that wouldn't have fit with the additional metric of "conflict in profound ways with the agendas of both sides".
I sort of kind of guessed that taxes on greenhouse gases would make the list, evoking my usual "*shudder* Pigouvian taxes" reaction.
I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.
The prison take I definitely wasn't expecting, and that's a good one. It always does baffle me how drugs in particular get into prisons. And the tradeoffs of cost versus incarceration are indeed tricky.
On the prisons issue, I remember Democrats making a lot of political hay out of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey spending COVID stimulus on the construction of new prisons. The idea was that Ivey was supporting mass incarceration over fighting COVID.
But many Alabama prisons are awful, some don't even have air conditioning. As this article notes, it's important to give criminals better prison conditions, so they don't recidivate and for simple human rights reasons. You'd think progressives would understand this.
Anthony Kennedy wrote a real good SCOTUS opinion detailing the problem with overcrowded prisons in particular. Probably can't push further with this SCOTUS, though, and if anything I wouldn't be surprised if states facing budget crunches start packing them in again and dare this SCOTUS to overturn what Kennedy wrote.
The worse, the better, because the more awful the prisons are, the more viable prison abolition becomes. (Yes we're only going from 0% to 0.1% in probability of success, but still worth the tradeoff in their minds.)
I mean it should be said that using COVID relief funds to build more prisons is worthy of some opprobrium no? Especially given prisons were huge vectors for spreading COVID?
Add in that the cost to build the prison ballooned from $600 million to over a billion (in a state that is famously not exactly rich. Tradeoffs and all that). Add in Alabama’s less than stellar record in properly administering justice and making sure people who don’t deserve to go to prison actually don’t end up in prison, not hard to see the case for opposition.
Feel like this is a case where the loudness of the “defund the police” brigade and some ot their more unworkable and unwise ideas is maybe distracting us from the fact that a lot prisons really do have way too many people in them setting aside how humane conditions are in said prison.
'I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.'
The nature of birthright citizenship means that conservatives will inevitably conclude that a guest worker program without specific end-dates is no different in terms of its effects from what they hate about other immigration pathways.
I read yesterday that California spends four times as much per prisoner as Texas, without any obvious impact. There are specific issues with union in California but that seems only part of the explanation. There seems to be two general problems standards aren't enforced and spending isn't rigorously investigated for value.
Government has, over the past 20-30 years, completely lost the capacity to investigate spending for value. I don’t really know why but it’s the story over and over.
I think a lot of this is downstream of proceduralism/litigation that really started taking off in the 70s. A lot of the burden placed on government is cumulative, so it's progressively gotten worse over time.
RE: CA vs TX There are many contributing factors but one I’m aware of is that California and Texas are in different federal judiciary districts, California being much more liberal than Texas, and down stream of that California prisons are under some federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not.
Globally, the issue IMO is that most aspects of prisons, and crime/punishment in general have very different theories of action, desired outcomes etc in lib vs leftist vs conservative groups.
Conservative: bad people commit crimes, they should be punished for their bad behavior, and society should also be protected from bad people. Prison exists to punish bad people and protect society from their badness.
Center/Lib: prison isn’t a punishment, it’s deterrence. The way prison lowers crime is through motivating people to not want to go prison. We should do an appropriately small amount of prison to deter crime and it shouldn’t be cruel.
Leftist: prison causes crime. It disrupts families and drives poverty in impacted communities. The outcomes prison drives are worse than a world with no prison, so we should have a little prison as society can stomach, ideally zero prison.
"does California's prison system optimise for their objectives"
its hard to optimize a system for any objective when the multiple stakeholders (judiciary, state executive branch, the public, the people who work at the prison) have a completely different understanding of that the system is, what is should do, and what it actually does currently in practice.
I think your reply is saying that even if Ca was better at investigating why their costs are higher, it might not make much difference because they have such different goals?
yes, my point is that its hard to optimize a system then the different stakeholders (judiciary, legislators/dem party, executive brand, the people who actually run the prison, the public) have completely different understandings of the purpose the system serves
Prison reform is one of my obsessions too. Unfortunately, there’s very little NGO attention paid to it and all the money that is there, equates prison reform with ‘ending mass incarceration’. I want bad guys in prison but prison to not be hell for them.
I should note that if you polled all three of these “politically homeless” stances, I think it pretty likely you would get more self described Democrats than Republicans supporting your stances. I think you may right that some of the political opposition to all of these ideas may come Dems or lefty “groups” but I think that’s qualitatively different than saying these ideas are politically homeless. My point being I think you should be less sanguine about the idea your three propositions are politically homeless.
You want a “politically homeless” policy idea that I think is actually a very good one it’s proposing the US have a federal VAT. It’s probably the most economically efficient tax out there. And if your goal is to either raise revenue to fund new social programs or find a way to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit, this is the solution. In other words in theory it’s something either GOP or Democrats should or could be advocating. In practice, the opposition would be vociferous*. Business community would absolutely scream bloody murder at their costs going up and on the Left, a VAT would be demagogued as a giant sales tax that would fall on the poor (never mind you could exempt items like groceries). I feel like you need just one politician to take the “hit” by proposing it just so it’s finally out there in the political arena.
* There are so many tragedies involved with everything Trump is going. But one underrated one is given the absolute loyalty he has (or maybe had) from the Base, he had a unique opportunity to propose good taxes or fiscal policy most politicians would be too afraid to touch. And instead he decided on tariffs, one of the dumbest taxes you can have all because his brain turned to goo circa 1990 and his ideas about trade are stuck in era when fears of Japan literally buying America or “eating our lunch” was a very real thing.
I'll be honest, as a lib I've always wondered why people like a VAT versus higher income/capital taxes (including on the middle class). It just feels like they'd both get the job done, and one would be more likely to actually be progressive. I know progressivism isn't the end all be all, but I want the poorest segment of Americans to pay as little tax as possible and even the lower middle class to not have to pay a ton.
I am completely in favor raising capital gains taxes to where they were in the 90s. I know there is literature indicating how you don't want to overly tax investment income given investments are ultimately what grow the economy. But it seems clear to me that we are way to the left of the curve as far as the optimal capital gains tax rate should be if the goal is to maximize revenue without causing undo damage to investment. I bring up the 90s almost as evidence of my point. I think especially in "red states" there is a ton of room to increase income taxes*; the lack of income tax in Texas and Florida is just a straight up giveaway to rich people given how little middle, working class and poor people in state income taxes especially once deductions and credits are factored in. In "blue" states like CA and NY, I do suspect you might be getting somewhat close to the limits how much you can raise taxes without causing real economic harm, but no I do not believe GOP rhetoric (and especially hedge fund manager rhetoric**) that raising taxes on the 1% even a tiny amount is going to cause some avalanche of rich people to "flee" to Florida or something**.
My point being I'm not at all against the idea there is room to increase Capital gains taxes and income taxes to help fund various government programs without undo damage to the economy. I think the issue is given some of the spending proposals out there from various Democrats or left leaning orgs, it's not at all clear that there is enough money that can be generated via increasing capital gains taxes or income taxes to fund these programs unless you raised capital gains taxes and income taxes to such a degree that it would actually cause real economic harm (my guess is at or near 50% is where you start having problems). And lets be real, what we're really talking about is "Medicare for All"***. If we want some "Medicare for All", you're going to need a funding source that goes beyond modestly higher capital gains taxes and income taxes. And the appeal of VAT is its a great funding source that also comes with minimal damage (or at least less damage) to the economy than the "deadweight loss" that comes from other taxes.
** If there is something that causes my inner Lenin to come out even briefly it's when Hedge Fund Managers talk about the burden of higher taxes and then very theatrically "flee" to Florida in a way that gets headlines in WSJ and CNBC. Given Hedge Fund Managers via the carried interest loophole are some of the least taxed rich people in America, their complaints are especially nauseating and to be frank disgusting.
*** One thing I do think is damaging from Bernie is his specific "Medicare for All" proposal goes way beyond most other socialized health care systems. I don't think it's really recognized how unique UK's system given the government owns both the hospitals and provides single payer insurance. But my bigger point is there are way less costly ways to get to socialized medicine then what Bernie proposed, but unfortunately he's created an "anchor" in too many Progressives brains which means other plans that are still quite comprehensive in their scope get pilloried as some how selling out to rich special interests.
I've been kind of thinking that even though both parties hate a VAT right now, if some day a budget crunch hits hard enough, both parties may feel they have no choice but to simultaneously flip flop to make it work, given that they might hate other taxes for for different reasons.
It is really odd that drone delivery hasn't taken off anywhere, apart from in prisons where there is great deal of effort put into stopping it but there seems to be financial viable system of efficient drug and phone deliveries.
It isn't weird. The FAA requires line of sight for drone operation. How could it possibly take off under that restriction? Only people who don't care about the FAA can do it. Ergo, prisons and drugs.
Proposed Part 108 would allow Beyond Visual Line of Sight for drones but I don't know if it has actually been accepted.
I wasn't limiting to the US: France and Iceland had drone delivery projects, I think Iceland had pizza delivery by drone for a while. But they have faded
Because I'm a nerd who loves cross-tabs on hot takes like these, I built an interactive app to gauge visualize how different communities stack up on a variety of takes across different dimensions. It’s basically perfect for the Matt Yglesias audience lol. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring community: https://votto.app/slowboring
Check it out if you like interesting cross-tabs and cool charts like I do. Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey, so don’t expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush.
I don't have an inherent problem with it--the tradeoff arises when there are jobs to fill that can't find any workers with proficient English to be willing to take them.
it's a tradeoff for sure. But most of the opposition to immigration seems to be cultural, not economic, and language differences are probably a huge part of that cultural opposition
I fear that the economic factors would become present in some sectors if they ended up with labor shortages and less production that pisses people off with higher prices and less availability.
Having lived a while in a place with access to cheap au pairs - Hong Kong - I can affirm that it is an amazing way to raise a young family. Instead of two working parents who always feel overwhelmed, you actually are able to be your own adult still. Date nights aren't this impossible thing to schedule around a high schooler's life for one.
I used to have this Puritanism about hiring other people to do things for you but having a little kid is pretty overwhelming! We never had an au pair but did hire housecleaners and night nannies. I had to promise to get over it to have our second kid and must admit it makes life way better. We should be making it easier to outsource household tasks to willing people who get paid a fair wage regardless of where they happen to have been born.
I love Matt's take on a carbon tax, but I'd suggest he amend the idea to include a taxing non-carbon air pollution. Combining all the externalities of combustion into a single tax strengthens the case for it. Emphasizing the harms and cost of air pollution should make it much easier to bring even the climate skeptical public along. The math for the cost of the non-carbon air pollution externality is more robust and less controversial than carbon cost math. In fact, I'd bet the largest politically feasible carbon tax could be justified entirely by the non-carbon air pollution cost alone.
I'm really at a loss as to why environmental groups haven't already done this. Everyone understands that air pollution is bad and there's much less denialism about it. It's crazy that we let people driving gas cars emit non-carbon pollution with a ~$400-500 a year cost to society without any tax at all on that externality. Meanwhile, many states jumped to institute outsized EV registration taxes to make up for lost gas tax revenue. This combination is terrible pubic policy, imo.
They have. Cap-and-trade originated as a (extraordinarily successful) mechanism for sulfur dioxide regulation.
As for EV registration fees, states having the power to tax (and, per CJ Marshall, implicitly to destroy) markets the national government thinks are beneficial is one of the reasons why federalism is dumb.
I will offer another idea in the same spirit: we should have a national ID system along with comprehensive administrative data about where everyone lives. This would simplify many different government and business processes, make the administrative state work better, solve questions like voter ID, and would not meaningfully impact anyone's privacy.
There's a slow boring piece on this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-lying-about-dead-people
No, it's better to have to bring a ragged copy of your birth certificate, a dog-eared paper social security card, and some utility bills to prove who you are. That's a system that has stood the test of time - why change it?
Ha - I have a utility bill that I subscribe to for the pure reason of needing (X) number utility bill to submit for idiotic things to "prove my identity". It's literally that stupid.
Not only an ID but it should be associated with a bank account (at the fed or treasury) and be cryptographically enabled so you can use it to prove your identity for financial transactions etc and verify properties like your age in a zero trust fashion. These features will essentially ensure everyone has one.
Right now our digital lives are all at risk because we sometimes lose things like phones keyfobs so we need to be able to access our digital accounts if that happens. The right way to fix this is the same system for passports, the government is responsible for verifying your identity and not Gmail. That way you don't need to worry you will lose your email if you secure it and if not it can be used to steal your money. Post office branches should perform these services.
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The government bank accounts need only be mediums of exchange you can go to a private bank for interest, ATMs etc
Sounds like a nightmare... I'll stick with what privacy I can eek thank you.
Postal Bank accounts is what you're reaching for. Pure payment accounts as an option.
that world would be a better and more convenient one that privacy advocates would never allow us to have
Is it politically homeless to have the view that monocause Advocates/Activists of all stripes, LEft, Right, should be sent to reeducation camps?
India had great success with this and most of continental Europe has some version that helps makes things a bit more efficient.
But at no cost to the person.
The identifying information should also be changeable in case of fraud. You can prove your identity some other way, like showing up in person with your face and fingerprints, and get a new ID card with a new number. That way it's also more secure than a social security number.
On my phone I have a Digital ID, passport verified. Easy and at no cost to me. However, I doubt I will ever be asked to use it. I have tried to use my Maryland Digital License at TSA several times, but only get weird looks from the agents and hostile stares ( I assume) from the folks behind me! But maybe sometime, this will be the way to go.
One thing that always makes me enraged at our system is traveling to Europe. I went through a spell at work where I had to fly to Europe several times a year. It was so much easier going through passport control at Heathrow as an American than it was going through passport control when arriving back in the US.
Members of Congress should be paid a lot more. Considering that Congress hasn't given itself a pay raise in nearly 20 years shows that this idea is not popular. Many of my coworkers believe that members of Congress are paid to much as it is. Do we really expect members of Congress to work solely out of their own goodwill and sense of duty?
You can add “increase the number of professional staff members” to your list. It’s not a perfect solution but it seems to me to be a necessary way to reduce the power of lobbyists & the congressional leadership.
It’s amazing to me how hard it is to convince people that increasing salaries for Congressmen, senators and staffers would actually decrease how many rich people work in Congress and how much “millionaires and billionaires” have influence over legislation
Running for office is a full-time job, even for state-level jobs.
A candidate for state house I know is spending 20+ hours a week meeting constituents. He has a job but it's on hold so not paying him. His wife keeps the household running. All this to get a job that runs about half the year and pays $14,000. The dream is to be speaker of the state house, that's a princely sum of $38,000.
I think it's an underrated reason why a lot of State legislatures end up having a disproportionate number of members with extreme view or lets be frank, absolute lunatics.
I suspect a lot of "normal" people are put off by risk/reward aspect of running for office in part due to the money issue.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike what Newt Gingrich has done to America but an underrated one was his changes to the institution of Congress itself and how much he gutted money that goes to staffers.
I don't think this is politically homeless in the same way Matt's ideas are though. It sounds like something Dems would *want* to support but think would just leave them too vulnerable to attack.
Yes, I'd be fine with both but I would choose the staffers first, and it might be more politically palatable too, since staffers don't evoke the "Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns" reaction as much as politicians do.
There are already something like 18,000 people working for congress. That seems excessive.
How does that break down by job type?
One worker in Congress for every 20,000 residents does not strike me as a particularly high ratio. To say the least. Most House members have tiny staffs relative to the amount of work they do.
We'd do a lot better to redirect all of the immense manpower that's wasted on our (I am not making this number up) 90,000 mostly pointless busybody local governments into national policymaking.
My even more unpopular opinion is all the rule-making bureaucrats in executive branch agencies should actually work directly for Congress, helping craft legislation. Republicans don't like this because it would require spending money on Congress and for Congress to, you know, occasionally do something. Democrats don't like this because their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends would no longer be free to make laws.
This is sort of interesting because if you're familiar with the right wing arguments downstream of unitary executive theory, right wingers are arguing agencies and their staff are already creatures of Congress rather than the president.
In fairness they all seem to be getting some kind of de facto pass on what looks to everyone else like insider trading.
They are not particularly good at it (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272722000044), and the whole affair smacks of stupidity.
My understanding is most analysis is done on self-reported trades, which are far from comprehensive. Eg Nancy Pelosi reports all her (husband’s) trading activity, but most don’t.
Also high-level appointees at agencies like NIH, whose pay is capped at a fraction of what they would be earning as full professors at an R1 medical school, while having vastly more responsibility. It's insane.
This, but state lawmakers. They’re pitifully underpaid and part time, meaning the only people making state laws are rich people and retirees
The issue is actually less pay to members per se (though that should be raised somewhat) and more pay to staff, which is awful and not competitive even with the Executive Branch much less the private sector. It's preposterous how skinflint our legislative branch is when it comes to paying for good policymaking.
But, like many of the ideas here, this is just Republicans starving government services and Dems being politically intimidated into not doing the right thing because it's easily demagogued.
Members of Congress get paid a fine amount—$174,000 is already well into the top 10% of salaries. Saying that getting paid that much is just working out of goodwill and duty is kind of insulting to most people. There is dignitary value in knowing that the people who rule us aren’t also making unfathomable amounts of money. They shouldn’t have it all.
You made a weird and bad faith pas de deux going from "they shouldn't be paid less than a first year associate at a Big Law firm" to "so you mean they should be paid unfathomable amounts of money?"
There's a massive amount of monetary space between those two options. Collapsing them is bad.
The big disconnect here is that, for the sort of people who typically become Congresspeople and the sort of people who typically know Congresspeople, $174,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money. For the average voter, it sounds like a ton, because the average voter is paid $62,000 (median earnings).
I suspect if you asked the average voter what CEOs should be paid, you'd get an answer in the range of $500,000-$1,000,000 a year - and they'll probably tell you that no-one should earn more than 50K in their first year of work, regardless of what they do (ie first-year associates should be on 50K or so, and they'll get to 100K in about five years).
The problem here is that voters have the ability to set Congressional pay as if the economy had the pay distribution they would like it to have, but they can't shape the whole economy to have that pay distribution, which rather leaves Congress in the cold.
Also voters wouldn't support the sort of interventions needed to make the private sector set pay the way they think it should. It isn't even a "will the ends but not the means" thing, it's just not something they've really ever thought about properly, but there are a lot of people who think that since they are paying taxes, no-one being paid out of those taxes should earn a lot more than they personally earn. It's not systematic, it's not thought-through, it's just "two hundred grand is way too much money, it's more than three times what I get paid".
I bet 99% of first year associates at big law firms would happily trade places with members of Congress. It’s a crappy job and that’s why they have to get paid a lot. Being a member of Congress is an extremely powerful job and it offends people’s egalitarian sensibilities for it to also be extremely well-paid.
The average House member spends 50% of their time just on raising money for the next election, never mind all the travel involved. I doubt most associates would like that. If they did they would've gone into sales.
They have to maintain two households, one of them in a VHCOL city.
They should live in their home districts and get compensated for their expenses when they travel to DC like private sector workers who travel a lot.
That would cost more. Once someone is spending c.100 nights in a single place, it's cheaper to rent or buy full-time than to pay for hotels or short-stay rentals.
What the government should do is buy a property in DC (which the Congressperson chooses, within a government-set budget), let the Congressperson live in it rent-free while they are in Congress, and then sell it when they leave. That's easily the cheapest way to do it, as the increase in value accrues to the government, not to the Congressperson. At the moment, they take on a mortgage on a property in DC, and if they stay in Congress long enough to pay that mortgage off (or even a substantial part of it), they can sell up when they leave and make a significant profit from doing so.
I know people sometimes suggest building an apartment building for Congress, but that would be much more expensive than just letting them pick one on the open market for a fair price and then having the Federal Government buy it - because concentrating all of them in one place would create a security risk that having them spread all over DC doesn't.
Three cheers for three deeply useful perspectives. Now to the even more burning question - why are these (to this reader) genuinely correct views so homeless.
Well, look at the childish level of the gerrymandering debate that's playing out now - you started it! No, you started it! Everyone mouths the words that say gerrymandering isn't good, but yet keeps digging the hole deeper.
Maybe they'll soon get to rock bottom on this issue and start doing something constructive instead of destructive, but it's a very slow process, and there are a lot more issues like this than there is attention span to focus on them all.
Sorry, but Dems actually did try harder to reduce gerrymandering
I feel fairly confident that if Democrats come out of the current gerrymandering cycle with a slight advantage, they'll lose interest in any reforms that don't lock in their advantage, until population shifts erode it.
Meaning you admit that they did in fact try harder in the past.
As Matt has written about before, Democrats are still fighting against measures they see as suppressing voter turnout despite any such measure now being to their advantage, so I don't think the observed behavior of Democrats supports your prediction.
I don't think they'll trust the advantage to stick and they'd be a lot happier with a national anti-gerrymandering law. They've only been able to get the measures they have done by putting sunset clauses in; they can't rely on winning a referendum every ten years (both CA and VA have been much closer than the general D-R margin).
The first and the third seem like a straight up tradeoff of being costly versus being insufficiently strict, with the twist being that one side each on the simplistic right/left spectrum being on inverted ends of each one.
And the guest worker one seems to be a values issue of whether we want foreign people at all in the country versus fully integrating foreign customs into the country, with economic considerations a bit on the side of that, even if it's positive sum.
I think that we DO want immigrants, including some unskilled ones, but not as guest workers. See comment (now high LOL) above.
The primary system funnels freaks into general election, which then funnels them into office, and working with the opposing side is seen as selling out. Case and point, AIPAC is running attack ads against Tom Malinowski for voting “with Trump and the Republicans to fund ICE”.
The content of attack ads is often unrelated to their motive. AIPAC only cares about candidates' support for Israel, but if they deem someone insufficiently pro-Israel, they will run whatever ads they think will hurt them.
I've heard similar things about the other kind of AI PAC -- they choose politicians to oppose on the basis of who wants to regulate AI, but attack them on what they think voters won't like. I vaguely recall something about the OpenAI-funded PAC attacking a candidate for being too pro-AI when their real motive for attacking the candidate was the opposite, but I don't remember the details or where I saw it (maybe somewhere in Zvi Mowshowitz's substack, but that's a big and messy place to search).
Another politically dead idea is bringing back and investing heavily in institutions or asylums for the mentally ill. Conservatives love to talk about getting the crazies off the street. There is nowhere to put them - we can’t jail them permanently for being homeless, and not in the general population. Liberals love to talk about helping them in a way that preserves their agency and rights. Some of them are too ill for that to work.
We don't have the jail space to do it permanently either and it's preferable not putting schizophrenic in with general pop in any case.
This stuff costs money. I wonder how much cash the average schmuck would be willing to shell out to not have people sleeping in doorways and talking to spirits?
It does cost a lot of money, but probably a net financial benefit, keeping someone on the streets is incredibly expensive in terms of healthcare and police time.
Yeah, the core problem with institutionalization is that unless you're just warehousing people in feces-stained dungeons (which has its own... obvious... issues) it costs a metric ass-tonne of money, and it's questionable to say the least whether the outcomes are worth it.
This is such a values-driven issue that I wish the more expensive options could be opt-in somehow—like through targeted taxes or rich donors. Most people can agree there’s a moral dimension here, but how much you’re willing to spend on uncertain claims about the welfare of severely mentally ill people varies a lot from person to person.
I guess it's already kind of that way, because different states and cities fund things differently, but maybe large states or private institutions could attempt to make it more explicit.
Love all of these. In the spirit of piece, I'll add my own: taxes on vehicle miles traveled (as well as all highways as toll roads) to replace the ineffectual gas tax. Would people hate it? Absolutely, it would never happen! It would probably force people onto surface streets in the short term (which is why you'd need to tax all miles traveled).
But tolling would (a) cause people to drive less, (b) force governments to think harder about which highways to build/expand/retire.
Roads are a really expensive line item for local and state agencies; we also should really be sunsetting roads with less heavily traveled. You can say this is unfair to more rural people and it is but they are eating up a disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of revenue created and are loss leaders.
Honestly, my unpopular opinion in the theme of these is that we should really be using more sub-urban and urban new housing to re-home the disaffected MAGA voters dying deaths of despair.
It's foolish to try to give enough money to each small town and locality to produce more jobs for them but we can definitely get them more housing in more urban areas (eventually). This would lead to greater avg worker productivity and to closer alignment with political democracy on the margins.
The hyperfragmentation of local government that your comment sort of implies (to me!) is also a problem.
I think my most unpopular opinion is "ghost towns are good; better to empty the place out when there's no longer an economic use for it than to have people hanging on with an entire economy running on subsidies from elsewhere"
I dunno. In my area, the people with the longest commutes are lower- middle income people who can’t afford to live in the city. They already suffer from the longer commute and greater gas expenditure, and can’t work from home or easily cut back on their driving in other ways. I wouldn’t want to penalize them further.
That's because it's illegal to build the housing they need in the city. Everyone's commutes could be shorter if we stopped letting NIMBYs run the show.
It would be really easy with modern tech to give poor people a discount on tolls (no one else would even need to know!) just like some cities do for bus passes, but I never hear anyone talk about this.
I’ve long thought all restricted access highways should be tolled, especially now that we have remote tolling technology available.
Controlled access freeways are definitely the easiest to put use fees on, for sure. A total VMT use fee would still be easy to charge by just looking at the odometer, and a weight coefficient on at least the vehicle is easy to calculate, although it can't account for cargo as easily. The congestion coefficient is more difficult, though, becuase I worry that outside freeways that would require transponders, and people would lose their shit over that.
I agree just tolling highways isn’t as optimal, but in the near term it’s more practical.
Odometer VMT opens up state-level squabbles about who gets the revenue—is it fair that CT gets to keep a Fairfield commuter’s VMT revenue when they spend a significant amount of time driving in NY?
In any event, first step would be to repeal the toll ban on federally funded highways.
Hm, didn't think about that. But if not the odometer then I fear that's also going to require transponders.
Don't many cars have built-in GPS already? The data is being generated about where they are, and therefore how far they travel along a given road. You just need to give the information to the department of transportation.
And that's where people would freak out--"I don't want the government tracking where I'm going!!!!", even though it can be designed to just give the government the status of the road as being under one jurisdiction, or whether or not it's congested, and not precisely which road and where on the road the vehicle is.
The gas tax is easy to levy and encourages more fuel efficient vehicles. It’s true that the tax isn’t very high, but the tax isn’t high for a reason which wouldn’t disappear if replaced.
As more ppl switch to EVs govts will have to switch to VMT fees bc the gas tax revenue will decline.
They don't *have* to, but any other funding would be a cross subsidy to heavy use motorist commuters at the expense of light use and non-motorist commuters. A use fee for government services makes the best sense here.
Well they’ll have to do SOMETHING is my point and VMT charges are a sensible alternative.
We agree there!
They could make vehicle registration fees more expensive to compensate for gas tax revenue falling. That would effectively be a subsidy from low-mileage to high-mileage users, but would also be a strong incentive to low-mileage users to not have a car at all any more.
There needs to be viable ways for people to forgo cars, though.
Interesting points, except for the claim that leftists shy away from making prisons more humane. Is there evidence for that? Here in NYC, I know that Zohran Mamdani has ended solitary confinement, seems far more committed than Eric Adams to closing Rikers, and is already moving to open new infirmaries and better borough-based jails. From what I see, the opposition is entirely on the conservative side: either resistance to spending more money or pressure from the corrections union, whose officers are unhappy about losing solitary confinement as a tool for dealing with unruly prisoners.
The people who want to close Rikers because it's inhumane (which it genuinely is) typically do not want to build a new facility or facilities of similar scale and just house the same set of people in humane conditions.
My understanding is that the only real reason the city is doing this is because the corrections workers had too hard a time getting in to work and were complaining about it (or, because their absurd union contract allows for unlimited sick leave, simply not showing up). Otherwise it makes little sense - the exact same corrections officers will staff the borough prisons.
I'm not sure how your comment relates to mine.
That’s fair! My point is that Riker’s closure was something the city wanted to make happen for boring technical (not necessarily technocratic) reasons. But it could never be sold on those terms, because the last thing anyone wants to hear is that a prison is opening up next door. The spirit of the 2010s provided a window to push it through, under the veneer of concern over the inhumanity of conditions at Riker’s. As you note, the people who were fired up about its closure would have strongly preferred that it not be replaced (or they’d compromise with replacing it with something much smaller).
"has ended solitary confinement" that's only more humane if you replace it with something. Otherwise you end up with a situation where prisoners who stab, assault and prey on other prisoners have no deterrent. The weak prisoners have human rights, too!
They shy away from putting people in prison, I think that's the main thing.
More people should be in prison and prisons shouldn't be anymore unpleasant than a long airplane flight in the middle seat.
I would like time in prison to be a little more unpleasant than an airline flight. Somewhere in the range of breaking rocks in the hot sun seems appropriate.
That you and many other Americans want this is one of the big reasons our prison system has much worse results than other rich countries.
It sounds like you might not know that much about how other rich country prison systems work, or if you do, you might be making apples-to-oranges comparisons based on the mix of prisoners inhabiting various incarceration systems.
Is your claim that US prisons (taking that to mean the whole of the penal incarceration system) get better results than other rich countries, or that they're nicer to be incarcerated in?
There's a bunch of things that are worth thinking about. Starting with rich countries - I assume you're talking about places like the Nordics and other places in Western Europe that appear to have it together, because equally rich and orderly Japan, S Korea and Taiwan have a level of strictness that you'd probably consider inhumane.
But a more important point is that you really have to try to do an apples to apples comparison, and "taking the whole of the penal incarceration system" is kind of a dodge. The states of Mississippi and Louisiana have homicide rates around 30 per 100,000, versus around 1 per 100k in most of Europe and lower single digits for the safer states in the USA.
You just can't expect prisons, nor public expectations, to function the same way in a lockup that's housing large fraction of repeat violent criminals when compared to one that's mostly traffic violations, and a ton of differences you're complaining about are simply downstream of those levels of criminality.
But if you narrow things down to the most apples-to-apples comparisons, comparing say, low-risk level lockups from safer US states to medium or high risk level lockups in Europe, everything from the conditions to the recidivism start to look a lot more similar
(also it's commonly missed that a large portion of low Euro recidivism is due to deporting immigrants, who make up like 25-50% of their incarcerated, after their sentence.)
Here are a couple trackers with relevant data if you're curious:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/immigrant_prison
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/murder_prison
I'm at least somewhat familiar with the Western European approach to incarceration since that's where I live. I think their approach would be a bad fit for the US due to the relative disparity in social cohesion between countries.
I think higher social cohesion and commensurate lower rates of severe crime enable you to have a kinder, gentler prison system. I suspect people in favor of a kinder, gentler prison system think the causality runs the other way.
I think lower rates of social cohesion and more violence leads Americans to choose worse prison systems but I don't think it makes those systems more necessary. America's high rate of violent crime doesn't necessitate letting the Aryan Nation run federal prisons.
The only serious approaches I've heard for breaking the control of Aryan Nation (who are probably less powerful than their Hispanic counterparts, fwiw) are hardcore "penal" solutions, like solitary and the death penalty for prison murders.
I'm not against left-coded, soft-on-crime approaches to better prisons, but when it comes to the worst-of-worst criminals like these prison gangs, it's really hard to see how any of them are supposed to work.
What would be the point of that? The sort of people that end up in prison aren't going to be deterred by that sort of thing. It's pointless cruelty.
Getting such people out of society's hair (possibly indefinitely) is quite sufficient.
"It's pointless cruelty." it could be that. But there can also be reform regimes that impose discipline and structure, and meaningful work, even (perhaps especially) very hard work can sometimes provide that, and might be less cruel in the end than the tedious chaos of prison life as it usually exists.
Many leftists are AOK with violent men in women’s prisons, which is pretty damn inhumane if you ask me.
[rolleyes]
I think there are obvious exploitability problems with the way liberals have recently balanced trans rights and the housing of prisoners, but it's inflammatory and stupid to say that leftists are "AOK with violent men in women's prisons."
Go to InfoWars with this shit (while you still can!). Don't waste our time with it.
I think that if you told a Mamdani voter that they were getting borough-based prisons, but free buses, the 25 student classroom mandate, and expansion of rental vouchers were off the table because of a tight budget, you might be murdered.
Well it’s happening and he did a whole event about opening a new better infirmary for mentally ill detainees, which the NY Post was not happy about: https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/mamdani-opens-luxe-241-million-bellevue-hospital-ward-for-inmates-as-he-pushes-to-close-rikers/
I also think the opposition to making prisons more humane is entirely on the conservative side. None of Mamdani’s supporters were upset about this
Yeah, I think when the WFP and DSA types realize they’re being sold out, if you point out that Riker’s is happening they will not be so happy.
I wish most more politicians would just lie to the rubes and then govern like a boring technocrat once in power.
I was guessing that Matt's views on housing, education, and the global poor were going to make the list, but he's written a lot about those, and perhaps that wouldn't have fit with the additional metric of "conflict in profound ways with the agendas of both sides".
I sort of kind of guessed that taxes on greenhouse gases would make the list, evoking my usual "*shudder* Pigouvian taxes" reaction.
I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.
The prison take I definitely wasn't expecting, and that's a good one. It always does baffle me how drugs in particular get into prisons. And the tradeoffs of cost versus incarceration are indeed tricky.
On the prisons issue, I remember Democrats making a lot of political hay out of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey spending COVID stimulus on the construction of new prisons. The idea was that Ivey was supporting mass incarceration over fighting COVID.
But many Alabama prisons are awful, some don't even have air conditioning. As this article notes, it's important to give criminals better prison conditions, so they don't recidivate and for simple human rights reasons. You'd think progressives would understand this.
Anthony Kennedy wrote a real good SCOTUS opinion detailing the problem with overcrowded prisons in particular. Probably can't push further with this SCOTUS, though, and if anything I wouldn't be surprised if states facing budget crunches start packing them in again and dare this SCOTUS to overturn what Kennedy wrote.
The worse, the better, because the more awful the prisons are, the more viable prison abolition becomes. (Yes we're only going from 0% to 0.1% in probability of success, but still worth the tradeoff in their minds.)
Yep, total "Those contradictions won't heighten themselves!" energy there.
I mean it should be said that using COVID relief funds to build more prisons is worthy of some opprobrium no? Especially given prisons were huge vectors for spreading COVID?
Add in that the cost to build the prison ballooned from $600 million to over a billion (in a state that is famously not exactly rich. Tradeoffs and all that). Add in Alabama’s less than stellar record in properly administering justice and making sure people who don’t deserve to go to prison actually don’t end up in prison, not hard to see the case for opposition.
Feel like this is a case where the loudness of the “defund the police” brigade and some ot their more unworkable and unwise ideas is maybe distracting us from the fact that a lot prisons really do have way too many people in them setting aside how humane conditions are in said prison.
Ooh recidivate, didn't know that could be a verb. Slick! Love catching new words.
'I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.'
The nature of birthright citizenship means that conservatives will inevitably conclude that a guest worker program without specific end-dates is no different in terms of its effects from what they hate about other immigration pathways.
Sure, these are takes that both parties hate for their own reasons, after all. I was just speaking on the merits.
Because if it isn't time limited then the state will in the end, find itself paying welfare costs.
How so if they're still getting paid to do their job? If they no longer have that job then I would certainly say they should leave.
I don't know how it happens, but it always does and inevitably will.
We’re pretty strict with H1Bs - find a job in 60 days or you’re out.
Do the people who don't get a job end up leaving?
Mostly
H1Bs? Yes, they’re all extremely conservative about the possibility of losing their jobs.
I don't know about the inevitability, seems like a policy execution choice to me.
Looks like a Dr. Manhattan meme situation.
Why are prisons so dysfunctional?
I read yesterday that California spends four times as much per prisoner as Texas, without any obvious impact. There are specific issues with union in California but that seems only part of the explanation. There seems to be two general problems standards aren't enforced and spending isn't rigorously investigated for value.
Government has, over the past 20-30 years, completely lost the capacity to investigate spending for value. I don’t really know why but it’s the story over and over.
I think a lot of this is downstream of proceduralism/litigation that really started taking off in the 70s. A lot of the burden placed on government is cumulative, so it's progressively gotten worse over time.
RE: CA vs TX There are many contributing factors but one I’m aware of is that California and Texas are in different federal judiciary districts, California being much more liberal than Texas, and down stream of that California prisons are under some federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not.
Globally, the issue IMO is that most aspects of prisons, and crime/punishment in general have very different theories of action, desired outcomes etc in lib vs leftist vs conservative groups.
Conservative: bad people commit crimes, they should be punished for their bad behavior, and society should also be protected from bad people. Prison exists to punish bad people and protect society from their badness.
Center/Lib: prison isn’t a punishment, it’s deterrence. The way prison lowers crime is through motivating people to not want to go prison. We should do an appropriately small amount of prison to deter crime and it shouldn’t be cruel.
Leftist: prison causes crime. It disrupts families and drives poverty in impacted communities. The outcomes prison drives are worse than a world with no prison, so we should have a little prison as society can stomach, ideally zero prison.
But does California's prison system optimise for their objectives? It seems to be expensive and abusive without being left wing in any direction.
"does California's prison system optimise for their objectives"
its hard to optimize a system for any objective when the multiple stakeholders (judiciary, state executive branch, the public, the people who work at the prison) have a completely different understanding of that the system is, what is should do, and what it actually does currently in practice.
I think your reply is saying that even if Ca was better at investigating why their costs are higher, it might not make much difference because they have such different goals?
yes, my point is that its hard to optimize a system then the different stakeholders (judiciary, legislators/dem party, executive brand, the people who actually run the prison, the public) have completely different understandings of the purpose the system serves
Prison reform is one of my obsessions too. Unfortunately, there’s very little NGO attention paid to it and all the money that is there, equates prison reform with ‘ending mass incarceration’. I want bad guys in prison but prison to not be hell for them.
I should note that if you polled all three of these “politically homeless” stances, I think it pretty likely you would get more self described Democrats than Republicans supporting your stances. I think you may right that some of the political opposition to all of these ideas may come Dems or lefty “groups” but I think that’s qualitatively different than saying these ideas are politically homeless. My point being I think you should be less sanguine about the idea your three propositions are politically homeless.
You want a “politically homeless” policy idea that I think is actually a very good one it’s proposing the US have a federal VAT. It’s probably the most economically efficient tax out there. And if your goal is to either raise revenue to fund new social programs or find a way to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit, this is the solution. In other words in theory it’s something either GOP or Democrats should or could be advocating. In practice, the opposition would be vociferous*. Business community would absolutely scream bloody murder at their costs going up and on the Left, a VAT would be demagogued as a giant sales tax that would fall on the poor (never mind you could exempt items like groceries). I feel like you need just one politician to take the “hit” by proposing it just so it’s finally out there in the political arena.
* There are so many tragedies involved with everything Trump is going. But one underrated one is given the absolute loyalty he has (or maybe had) from the Base, he had a unique opportunity to propose good taxes or fiscal policy most politicians would be too afraid to touch. And instead he decided on tariffs, one of the dumbest taxes you can have all because his brain turned to goo circa 1990 and his ideas about trade are stuck in era when fears of Japan literally buying America or “eating our lunch” was a very real thing.
I'll be honest, as a lib I've always wondered why people like a VAT versus higher income/capital taxes (including on the middle class). It just feels like they'd both get the job done, and one would be more likely to actually be progressive. I know progressivism isn't the end all be all, but I want the poorest segment of Americans to pay as little tax as possible and even the lower middle class to not have to pay a ton.
I am completely in favor raising capital gains taxes to where they were in the 90s. I know there is literature indicating how you don't want to overly tax investment income given investments are ultimately what grow the economy. But it seems clear to me that we are way to the left of the curve as far as the optimal capital gains tax rate should be if the goal is to maximize revenue without causing undo damage to investment. I bring up the 90s almost as evidence of my point. I think especially in "red states" there is a ton of room to increase income taxes*; the lack of income tax in Texas and Florida is just a straight up giveaway to rich people given how little middle, working class and poor people in state income taxes especially once deductions and credits are factored in. In "blue" states like CA and NY, I do suspect you might be getting somewhat close to the limits how much you can raise taxes without causing real economic harm, but no I do not believe GOP rhetoric (and especially hedge fund manager rhetoric**) that raising taxes on the 1% even a tiny amount is going to cause some avalanche of rich people to "flee" to Florida or something**.
My point being I'm not at all against the idea there is room to increase Capital gains taxes and income taxes to help fund various government programs without undo damage to the economy. I think the issue is given some of the spending proposals out there from various Democrats or left leaning orgs, it's not at all clear that there is enough money that can be generated via increasing capital gains taxes or income taxes to fund these programs unless you raised capital gains taxes and income taxes to such a degree that it would actually cause real economic harm (my guess is at or near 50% is where you start having problems). And lets be real, what we're really talking about is "Medicare for All"***. If we want some "Medicare for All", you're going to need a funding source that goes beyond modestly higher capital gains taxes and income taxes. And the appeal of VAT is its a great funding source that also comes with minimal damage (or at least less damage) to the economy than the "deadweight loss" that comes from other taxes.
** If there is something that causes my inner Lenin to come out even briefly it's when Hedge Fund Managers talk about the burden of higher taxes and then very theatrically "flee" to Florida in a way that gets headlines in WSJ and CNBC. Given Hedge Fund Managers via the carried interest loophole are some of the least taxed rich people in America, their complaints are especially nauseating and to be frank disgusting.
*** One thing I do think is damaging from Bernie is his specific "Medicare for All" proposal goes way beyond most other socialized health care systems. I don't think it's really recognized how unique UK's system given the government owns both the hospitals and provides single payer insurance. But my bigger point is there are way less costly ways to get to socialized medicine then what Bernie proposed, but unfortunately he's created an "anchor" in too many Progressives brains which means other plans that are still quite comprehensive in their scope get pilloried as some how selling out to rich special interests.
I've been kind of thinking that even though both parties hate a VAT right now, if some day a budget crunch hits hard enough, both parties may feel they have no choice but to simultaneously flip flop to make it work, given that they might hate other taxes for for different reasons.
It is really odd that drone delivery hasn't taken off anywhere, apart from in prisons where there is great deal of effort put into stopping it but there seems to be financial viable system of efficient drug and phone deliveries.
It isn't weird. The FAA requires line of sight for drone operation. How could it possibly take off under that restriction? Only people who don't care about the FAA can do it. Ergo, prisons and drugs.
Proposed Part 108 would allow Beyond Visual Line of Sight for drones but I don't know if it has actually been accepted.
I wasn't limiting to the US: France and Iceland had drone delivery projects, I think Iceland had pizza delivery by drone for a while. But they have faded
My biggest one. More voting does not improve democracy.
Because I'm a nerd who loves cross-tabs on hot takes like these, I built an interactive app to gauge visualize how different communities stack up on a variety of takes across different dimensions. It’s basically perfect for the Matt Yglesias audience lol. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring community: https://votto.app/slowboring
Check it out if you like interesting cross-tabs and cool charts like I do. Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey, so don’t expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush.
I’ll add some:
-Medicaid for all
-privatize social security
-congressional districts drawn by algorithm
-psychedelics legalized
-high immigration with strict screening for income and assimilation
-SNAP, section 8, etc all replaced by one fungible benefit that scales down with income
-fund the IRS
-massive inheritance taxes with a very low exemption ceiling
People get extremely mad when I say that our immigration system should include testing for English language proficiency.
I don't have an inherent problem with it--the tradeoff arises when there are jobs to fill that can't find any workers with proficient English to be willing to take them.
it's a tradeoff for sure. But most of the opposition to immigration seems to be cultural, not economic, and language differences are probably a huge part of that cultural opposition
I fear that the economic factors would become present in some sectors if they ended up with labor shortages and less production that pisses people off with higher prices and less availability.
yeah I agree with that
Fund the IRS? I seem to recall some sort of Inflation Reduction Act which did that, suggesting that such ideas are not exactly politically homeless.
Having lived a while in a place with access to cheap au pairs - Hong Kong - I can affirm that it is an amazing way to raise a young family. Instead of two working parents who always feel overwhelmed, you actually are able to be your own adult still. Date nights aren't this impossible thing to schedule around a high schooler's life for one.
I used to have this Puritanism about hiring other people to do things for you but having a little kid is pretty overwhelming! We never had an au pair but did hire housecleaners and night nannies. I had to promise to get over it to have our second kid and must admit it makes life way better. We should be making it easier to outsource household tasks to willing people who get paid a fair wage regardless of where they happen to have been born.
I love Matt's take on a carbon tax, but I'd suggest he amend the idea to include a taxing non-carbon air pollution. Combining all the externalities of combustion into a single tax strengthens the case for it. Emphasizing the harms and cost of air pollution should make it much easier to bring even the climate skeptical public along. The math for the cost of the non-carbon air pollution externality is more robust and less controversial than carbon cost math. In fact, I'd bet the largest politically feasible carbon tax could be justified entirely by the non-carbon air pollution cost alone.
I'm really at a loss as to why environmental groups haven't already done this. Everyone understands that air pollution is bad and there's much less denialism about it. It's crazy that we let people driving gas cars emit non-carbon pollution with a ~$400-500 a year cost to society without any tax at all on that externality. Meanwhile, many states jumped to institute outsized EV registration taxes to make up for lost gas tax revenue. This combination is terrible pubic policy, imo.
They have. Cap-and-trade originated as a (extraordinarily successful) mechanism for sulfur dioxide regulation.
As for EV registration fees, states having the power to tax (and, per CJ Marshall, implicitly to destroy) markets the national government thinks are beneficial is one of the reasons why federalism is dumb.